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A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud"
A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud"
A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud"
Ebook36 pages27 minutes

A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 27, 2016
ISBN9781535817417
A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud"

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    A Study Guide for Carson McCullers's "A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud" - Gale

    13

    A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud

    Carson McCullers

    1942

    Introduction

    A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud, by Carson McCullers, is a brief story set in a small twenty-four-hour café. When a twelve-year-old paperboy stops in before dawn for a cup of coffee, he is beckoned by an older man nursing a beer. The man tells the boy, whom he has never met, that he loves him, and then tells him the story of his unfortunate marriage. He also explains that he has developed a science to teach himself to practice and understand love. The other customers ignore or laugh at the man, and the boy does not know what to think of him.

    A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud was first published in the November 1942 issue of Harper's Bazaar and became one of the best known and widely anthologized of McCullers's short stories. Like much of the author's work, it is set in a small southern town and features characters who are isolated and searching. It is frequently included on high-school reading lists, and questions about the mysterious man's ideas about love—and whether the author is herself endorsing them—are the subjects of many high-school writing assignments. The story is included in the collection The Ballad of the Sad Café: The Novels and Stories of Carson McCullers, issued in 1951, as well as her Collected Stories, published in 1987.

    Author Biography

    Lulu Carson Smith was born on February 19, 1917, in Columbus, Georgia. Both of her parents could trace their family trees back through the South for several generations, and even though the author—who adopted her middle name as her first name when she was about thirteen—lived for extended periods in New York, New Hampshire, and Europe later in her life, she claimed that the South would always be a part of her and of her writing. As a child, she was passionate about playing the piano, practicing up to eight hours a day and intending to become a concert pianist. By the time she was seventeen, however, she gave up her ambition to be a great musician and focused her energies on writing.

    In 1934, she moved alone to New York City, working during the day and studying fiction writing at Columbia University at night. Almost right away she had two stories accepted

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